tasks and mail and keeping the eye on accepting unavoidable imperfection in my to-do-it-ness, not letting it snag me. I need more peace. I need less anxiety.does my silence scare you?

I closed the paper journal in favor of the keyboard. but they are different, I bemoan. I pick the keyboard like it’s the sugary waffle, spring fever, a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. but it’s faster. to which I respond by seizing up and not having fast or slow to say. i am making real progress on the admin. I have eaten two squirming toads from the inbox, I’m conquering it in stacks sorted by category: no bills because I picked those out of the mail daily and paid them, in emergency reserve mode I learned  from a friend in Utah.  ‘touch it once’ was her bill policy, she kept checks and a pen and calculator, envelopes and stamps in her vestibule table, all done. out the next day. almost no grief. great idea.

before I left for holiday travel, I sorted the contents of the cardboard file box of mail neglected since July. I’m proud of myself, all the utilities are on, nothing has bounced, all the insurances and fees and rents remain current, thanks to the touch-it-once practice of bill paying. but the rest… determining categories on the sorting operation was of course the best part: statements that go straight to filing; real admin matters that need attention; claims of this being the last issue of every one of my paper subscriptions (natural selection will help me)  NYT, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Microscopy Today, Organic Life, Horticulture, Fine Gardening, and Aesthetica which can go ahead and expire. Even though I haven’t even removed one issue from the little blue delivery bag in months, I feel the NYT subscription is a basic life utility, if only for the way the paper feels and smells. About 20 more years of printed reading material before only boutique specialty printers exist. then about 40 years after that, post-neo-hipsters will print what they think is a commie rag on paper and it will end up being the only form of mass media after the Great Flare.

i might even rather be working in the office, machine, almost. pictures and words, i might never make it out of the suds bucket. Machine suggests poor shampoo is orphaned, silly machine, no, that’s why I made myself post in every month. pattern, system, every month appears in the index, and mostly everything becomes past anyway, so merely to represent every month, i forced myself, even now i crinkle my nose, like it’s medicine.